Fortune and BusinessWeek are piling on the story of Harbinger Capital Partners, a $19 billion hedge fund, seeking to take over the New York Times (NYSE: NYT). Harbinger now owns 19% of its Class A shares. Of course, Harbinger is not the only threat to management of the Times -- News Corp.'s (NYSE: NWS) Rupert Murdoch is doing his part as well. Will Steve Rattner, a long-time friend of Times publisher Arthur Sulzberger and Managing Principal of Quadrangle Group, come to the rescue and take the Times private?

In play here are Phillip Falcone, a Harbinger partner who made $1.7 billion last year, and the quaint idea of protecting a media company's founding family by maintaining two classes of stock: Class A for the public to make insiders liquid and Class B for the insiders. Murdoch and Sulzberger enjoy protection for their family dynasties thanks to that two-tiered structure.

Falcone thinks that the Times is leaving huge amounts of money on the table by not "monetizing" all the comments on its stories. What sparked this idea was a January opinion piece by Caroline Kennedy comparing Barack Obama with her father, President John F. Kennedy. There were only a few comments about the article on the newspaper's Web site, nytimes.com, but there were hundreds on Huffington Post and Digg.com. BusinessWeek quotes Scott Galloway, founder of hedge fund Firebrand Partners and Falcone friend who said: "We came to the collective conclusion that there was so much upside in terms of billions of pages the paper wasn't monetizing. He [Falcone] never looked back."

Continue reading Will Steve Rattner save The New York Times?

Will Steve Rattner save The New York Times? originally appeared on BloggingStocks on Fri, 25 Apr 2008 10:10:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

In an act of admirable futility, Harbinger Capital Partners has informed the New York Times Co. (NYSE: NYT) that it will nominate directors to fill the four slots that are chosen by the company's public shareholders.

The other nine slots are chosen by the Ochs-Sulzberger family, which has effectively squelched any notion of shareholder democracy at the company with a dual-class voting structure.

I admire Harbinger for trying to have their voice heard at the company, but think about it: If the controlling family cared what outside shareholders think, they would let outside shareholders elect the whole board. Winning four board seats out of 13 will put Harbinger in a position of about as much power as members of the Iraqi Parliament held under Saddam Hussein.

Other activist shareholders have tried their hand at the company in the past and eventually thrown up their hands in frustration.

One way to fix the problem: The New York Stock Exchange should change its listing requirement to require that company's have only a single class of stock and give the Ochs-Sulzberger family an ultimatum: Let your shareholders run their company or change your symbol to NYTM.PK.

Fund wants board seats at New York Times -- Why? originally appeared on BloggingStocks on Sat, 26 Jan 2008 13:10:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

Dell is not the only troubled PC maker. Gateway is also in a mess. Actually, it seems like Gateway really is another way of saying "troubled." This stock has been torture, which is at a lowly $1.50. The high for the past year was $3.25.

Well, Harbinger Capital Partners, a hedge fund, sees this as an opportunity to agitate for change (i.e., a better stock price). To this end, the firm scooped up 10.2% of Gateway's outstanding shares. Harbinger Capital Partners also hired a group that knows how to attack lackluster managements: Firebrand Partners (yes, the name says it all). Steve Galloway is the founder of the firm, who also built the ecommerce site Red Envelope and is also a Clinical Associate Professor at The Stern School of Business, where he teaches brand strategy to 2nd-year MBA students.

The Gateway deal is potentially lucrative for Galloway. That is, he gets a 10% cut of any profits on the adventure.

His first step? He sent a letter to Gateway's management.

Continue reading Barbarians hunt for Gateway

Barbarians hunt for Gateway originally appeared on BloggingStocks on Mon, 21 Aug 2006 13:26:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.